Page "Handwriting recognition" Paragraph 7

Off-line character recognition often involves scanning a form or document written sometime in the past.

This means the individual characters contained in the scanned image will need to be extracted.

Tools exist that are capable of performing this step.

However, there are several common imperfections in this step.

The most common is when characters that are connected are returned as a single sub-image containing both characters.

This causes a major problem in the recognition stage.

Yet many algorithms are available that reduce the risk of connected characters.